The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce the 2020 recipients of its annual awards for distinguished service in the field of genetics. The awardees were nominated and selected by their colleagues and will be recognized with presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), held April 22-26, 2020, in the metro Washington, DC area.

Marivi Fernandez-Serra is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University.

Several groups of reptiles persisted in Jurassic Africa even as volcanism ruined their habitat

The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) announced the winners of its annual New Product Awards Monday afternoon at the 9th Annual SLAS International Conference and Exhibition in San Diego, CA, USA.

In short… I overdid it last year. I wrote two new books for publication in the first six months. Also during that time I expanded a previously written book by at least 25%, a lot of reference material for which didn’t really exist yet. Over the rest of the year, I wrote the second half […]

I remember you were sick, And yet I had to go. I wasn't there to watch you die, That pain, I hope, I'll never know. So I never got to say goodbye, I

I lost my beloved cat Gemma, seven months ago and when I think about her, I can smile a little. I can now think of the happy times and not that dreadful

Dear Shim Shim, I hate this month, it's so miserable and even more so cos you passed on Halloween eve. I remember it all so vividly, your loss and Zeusy's

Ivy came into my life on December 22, 2012. She was the most beautiful little creature I had ever seen and I knew instantly that she was supposed to be

Hi my baby girl, How are you? Are you playing and having a good time? Are you staying close to Rufus? I hope you're happy and have all kinds of new friends

Hi my big guy, How are you are you having fun? Are you playing and have you made new friends? Are you keeping an eye on Diana? I hope you are happy and

I was wondering if you might give my little women’s (boomers) some guidance as to a beginning graphic novel for...

[I am happy to turn this space over to my former colleague and (I trust) lifelong friend Romans Pancs, who offers what he describes as a polemical essay. It has no references and no confidence intervals. It has question marks. It makes a narrow point and does not weigh pros and cons. It is an […]

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.30. This is a security release.All PHP 7.2 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.For source downloads of PHP 7.2.30 please visit our downloads page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The problem: if you publish any document as PDF, in print, etc. and the text contains URLs, there is a chance that one day those URLs won't work anymore. There's nothing to do about that, it happens.

Luckily, this is a solved problem. The solution is to link to a stable and trustworthy website, that is, one that you maintain and host (of course, you're trustworthy!). Then in the document you link to that website, and the website redirects visitors to the actual location.

An example: my book contains a link to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/matthiasnoback/read-with-the-author. When I moved that repository to a new organization on GitHub, this link resulted in a 404 Page not found error. The proper URL is now https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author. Chris from Gitstore was able to save the day by setting up a redirect on their site, but I wanted to make sure this kind of problem would never be a problem for me again.

The ingredients for the solution:

• A domain name (I registered advwebapparch.com)
• A simple website that can redirect visitors to the actual locations

I wanted to hook this new website into my existing Docker-based setup which uses Traefik to forward traffic to the right container based on labels. It turns out, with a simple Nginx image and some custom setup we can easily set up a website that is able to redirecting visitors.

The Dockerfile for such an image:

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
COPY default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Where default.conf looks like this:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    index index.html;
    root /srv;

    error_page 404 /404.html;

    rewrite /repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author redirect;
}

This already works, and when I deploying the resulting image to the server that receives traffic for advwebapparch.com, a request for /repository will indeed redirect a visitor to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author using a temporary redirect.

Generating the Nginx configuration from a text file

When I'm working on my book, I don't want to manually update a server configuration file every time I'm adding a URL. Instead, I'd like to work with a simple text file. Let's name this file forwards.txt:

/repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author
/blog https://matthiasnoback.nl

And then I want the Docker image build process to add rewrite rules automatically, So I wrote a little PHP script that does this runs during the build. Here's what the Dockerfile looks like. It uses a multi-stage build:

FROM php:7.4-alpine as php
# This will copy build.php from the build context to the image
COPY . .
# This will generate default.conf based on template.conf
RUN php build.php

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
# Copy the default.conf from the php image to the nginx image
COPY --from=php default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Here's what happens inside the PHP script:

function insertRewritesInNginxConf(string $conf): string
{
    $rewrites = [];

    foreach (file('forwards.txt') as $line) {
        $line = trim($line);
        if (empty($line)) {
            continue;
        }

        $rewrites[] = '    ' . 'rewrite ' . $line . ' redirect;';
    }

    return str_replace(
        '%INSERT_URL_REWRITES_HERE%',
        implode("
", $rewrites),
        $conf
    );
}

/*
 * Generate the Nginx configuration which includes all the actual
 * redirect instructions
 */
file_put_contents(
    'default.conf',
    insertRewritesInNginxConf(file_get_contents('template.conf'))
);

We should add a bit of validation for the data from the forwards.txt file so we don't end up with a broken Nginx configuration, but otherwise, this works just fine.

Generating an html page which can be crawled for broken links

I don't want to manually check that all the links that are inside the "link registry" still work. Instead, I'd like to use Oh Dear for that, which does uptime monitoring and checks for broken links as well.

For this purpose I added another function to the PHP script, which, based

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1844 bytes)

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 29525 bytes)

Back when T-Mobile and Sprint were trying to gain regulatory approval for their $26 billion merger, executives repeatedly promised the deal would create jobs. Not just a few jobs, but oodles of jobs. Despite the fact that US telecom history indicates such deals almost always trigger mass layoffs, the media dutifully repeated T-Mobile and Sprint executive claims that the deal would create "more than 3,500 additional full-time U.S. employees in the first year and 11,000 more people by 2024."

About that.

Before the ink on the deal was even dry, T-Mobile began shutting down its Metro prepaid business and laying off impacted employees. When asked about the conflicting promises, T-Mobile refused to respond to press inquiries. Now that shutdown has accelerated, with estimates that roughly 6,000 employees at the T-Mobile subsidiary have been laid off as the freshly-merged company closes unwanted prepaid retailers. T-Mobile says the move, which has nothing to do with COVID-19, is just them "optimizing their retail footprint." Industry insiders aren't amused:

"Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile in Australia and in the U.S. who has been a vocal advocate for the Boost brand and for dealers since the merger was first proposed, figures the latest closures affect about 6,000 people. He cited one dealer who said he has to close 95 stores, some as early as May 1.

In their arguments leading up to the merger finally getting approved, executives at both T-Mobile and Sprint argued that it would not lead to the kind of job losses that many opponents were predicting. They pledged to create jobs, not cut them.

“The whole thing is exactly how we called it, and no one is calling them out. It’s so disingenuous,” Adderton told Fierce, adding that it’s not because of COVID-19. Many retailers in other industries are closing stores during the crisis but plan to reopen once it’s safe to do so."

None of this should be a surprise to anybody. Everybody from unions to Wall Street stock jocks had predicted the deal would trigger anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 layoffs over time as redundant support, retail, and middle management positions were eliminated. It's what always happens in major US telecom mergers. There is 40 years of very clear, hard data speaking to this point. Yet in a blog post last year (likely to be deleted by this time next year), T-Mobile CEO John Legere not only insisted layoffs would never happen, he effectively accused unions, experts, consumer groups, and a long line of economists of lying:

"This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter. That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact....These combined efforts will create nearly 5,600 new American customer care jobs by 2021. And New T-Mobile will employ 7,500+ more care professionals by 2024 than the standalone companies would have."

That was never going to happen. Less competition and revolving door, captured regulators and a broken court system means there's less than zero incentive for T-Mobile to do much of anything the company promised while it was wooing regulators. And of course such employment growth is even less likely to happen under a pandemic, which will provide "wonderful" cover for cuts that were going to happen anyway.

Having watched more telecom megadeals like this than I can count, what usually happens is the companies leave things generally alone for about a year to keep employees calm and make it seem like deal critics were being hyperbolic. Then, once the press and public is no longer paying attention (which never takes long), the hatchets come out and the downsizing begins. When the layoffs and reduced competition inevitably arrives, they're either ignored or blamed on something else. In this case, inevitably, COVID-19.

In a few years, the regulators who approved the deal will have moved on to think tank, legal or lobbying positions at the same companies they "regulated." The same press that over-hyped pre-merger promises won't follow back up, because there's no money in that kind of hindsight policy reporting or consumer advocacy. And executives like John Legere (who just quit T-Mobile after selling his $17.5 million NYC penthouse to Giorgio Armani) are dutifully rewarded, with the real world market and human cost of mindless merger mania quickly and intentionally forgotten.

COVID-19 has shone a very bright light on the importance of widely available, affordable broadband. Nearly 42 million Americans lack access to any broadband whatsoever--double FCC estimates. And millions more can't afford service thanks to a lack of competition among very powerful, government pampered telecom monopolies.

As usual, with political pressure mounting to "do something," DC's solution is going to be to throw more money at the problem:

"The plan unveiled Thursday would inject $80 billion over five years into expansion of broadband infrastructure into neglected rural, suburban and urban areas, with an emphasis on communities with high levels of poverty. It includes measures to promote rapid building of internet systems, such as low-interest financing for infrastructure projects."

To be clear, subsidies often do help shore up broadband availability at coverage. The problem is that the United States government, largely captured by telecom giants with a vested interest in protecting regional monopolies, utterly sucks at it.

Despite ample pretense to the contrary, nobody in the US government actually knows where broadband is currently available. Data supplied by ISPs has never been rigorously fact-checked by a government fearful of upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors (and valued NSA partners). As a result, our very expensive ($350 million at last count) FCC broadband coverage map creates a picture of availability and speed that's complete fantasy. It's theater designed to disguise the fact that US broadband is mediocre on every broadband metric that matters. Especially cost.

While there has been some effort to fix the mapping problem via recent legislation, the FCC still needs several years (and more money) to do so. And while you'd think this would be more obvious, you can't fix a problem you can't even effectively measure. There's also not much indication that the $80 billion, while potentially well intentioned, would actually get where it needs to go. Especially right now, when federal oversight is effectively nonexistent.

You may or may not have noticed this, but US telecom is a corrupt, monopolized mess. Giants like AT&T and Comcast all but own state and federal legislatures and, in many instances, literally write the law. Feckless regulators bend over backward to avoid upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors. So when subsidies are doled out, they very often don't end up where regulators and lawmakers intended. There's an endless ocean of examples where these giants took billions in taxpayer subsidies to deploy fiber networks that are never fully delivered.

If you were to do meaningful audit (which we've never done because again we're not willing to adequately track the problem or stand up to dominant incumbent corporations) you'd very likely find that American taxpayers already paid for fiber to every home several times over.

That's not to say is that there aren't things Congress could do to help the disconnected during COVID-19. Libraries for example have been begging the FCC for the ability to offer expanded WiFi hotspot access (via mobile school buses) to disconnected communities without running afoul of FCC ERate rules. But while the FCC said libraries can leave existing WiFi on without penalty, it has been mute about whether they can extend coverage outside of library property. Why? As a captured agency, the FCC doesn't like anything that could potentially result in Comcast or AT&T making less money.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't subsidize broadband deployment once we get a handle on the mapping problem. But it's a fantasy to think we're going to immediately fix a 30 year old problem with an additional $80 billion in a mad dash during a pandemic. US broadband dysfunction was built up over decades. It's the product of corruption and rot that COVID-19 is exposing at every level of the US government. The only way to fix it is to stand up to industry, initiate meaningful reform, adopt policies that drive competition to market, and jettison feckless lawmakers and regulators whose dominant motivation is in protecting AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Spectrum revenues.

Maybe the pandemic finally provides the incentive to actually do that, but until the US does, these subsidization efforts are largely theater.

You may recall in the early days of the pandemic, that pharma giant Gilead Sciences -- which has been accused of price gouging and (just last year!) charging exorbitant prices on drug breakthroughs developed with US taxpayer funds -- was able to sneak through an orphan works designation for its drug remdesevir for COVID-19 treatment. As we pointed out, everything about this was insane, given that orphan works designations, which give extra monopoly rights to the holders (beyond patent exclusivity), are meant for diseases that don't impact a large population. Gilead used a loophole: since the ceiling for infected people to qualify for orphan drug status is 200,000, Gilead got in its application bright and early, before there were 200,000 confirmed cases (we currently have over 1.3 million). After the story went, er... viral, Gilead agreed to drop the orphan status, realizing the bad publicity it was receiving.

After a brief dalliance with chloroquine, remdesivir has suddenly been back in demand as the new hotness of possible COVID-19 treatments. Still, a close reading of the research might give one pause. There have been multiple conflicting studies, and Gilead's own messaging has been a mess.

On April 23, 2020, news of the study’s failure began to circulate. It seems that the World Health Organization (WHO) had posted a draft report about the trial on their clinical trials database, which indicated that the scientists terminated the study prematurely due to high levels of adverse side effects.

The WHO withdrew the report, and the researchers published their results in The Lancet on April 29, 2020.

The number of people who experienced adverse side effects was roughly similar between those receiving remdesivir and those receiving a placebo. In 18 participants, the researchers stopped the drug treatment due to adverse reactions.

But then...

However, also on April 29, 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that their NIH trial showed that remdesivir treatment led to faster recovery in hospital patients with COVID-19, compared with placebo treatment.

“Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received placebo,” according to the press release. “Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo.”

The mortality rate in the remdesivir treatment group was 8%, compared with 11.6% in the placebo group, indicating that the drug could improve a person’s chances of survival. These data were close to achieving statistical significance.

And then...

“In addition, there is another Chinese trial, also stopped because the numbers of new patients with COVID-19 had fallen in China so they were unable to recruit, which has not yet published its data,” Prof. Evans continues. “There are other trials where remdesivir is compared with non-remdesivir treatments currently [being] done and results from some of these should appear soon.”

Gilead also put out its own press release about another clinical trial, which seems more focused on determining the optimal length of remdesivir treatment. Suffice it to say, there's still a lot of conflicting data and no clear information on whether or not remdesevir actually helps.

Still, that hasn't stopped people from trying to figure out just how much Gilead will price gouge going forward:

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), which assesses effectiveness of drugs to determine appropriate prices, suggested a maximum price of $4,500 per 10-day treatment course based on the preliminary evidence of how much patients benefited in a clinical trial. Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday said remdesivir should be priced at $1 per day of treatment, since “that is more than the cost of manufacturing at scale with a reasonable profit to Gilead.”

Some Wall Street investors expect Gilead to come in at $4,000 per patient or higher to make a profit above remdesivir’s development cost, which Gilead estimates at about $1 billion.

So... we've got a range of $10 to $4,500 on a treatment that we don't yet know works, and which may or may not save lives. But, given that we're in the midst of a giant debate concerning things like "reopening the economy" -- something that can really only be done if the public is not afraid of dying (or at least becoming deathly ill) -- the value to the overall economy seems much greater than whatever amount Gilead wants to charge. It seems the right thing to do -- again, if it's shown that remdesevir actually helps -- is to just hand over a bunch of money to Gilead, say "thank you very much" and get the drug distributed as widely as possible. Though, again, it should be noted that a decent chunk of the research around remdesevir was not done or paid for by Gilead, but (yet again) via public funds to public universities, which did the necessary research. The idea that it's Gilead that should get to reap massive rewards for that seems sketchy at best. But the absolute worst outcome is one in which Gilead sticks to its standard operating procedure and prices the drug in a way that millions of Americans can't afford it, and it leads to a prolonging/expanding of the pandemic.

Hibiscus tea mixed with tequila, lime, jalapeno, and pineapple makes this one delicious cocktail!

craving more? check out TasteSpotting

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